• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

7. getting hard intelligence on China’s nuclear facilities: National Photographic Interpretation Center, Mission [GRC-169], 23 August 1963, 30 pages. The designation for these missions was Operation Church Door. Images of targets photographed by the Black Cats include the Lop Nur nuclear facility, missile launch sites, airfields, ports, and industrial complexes.

8. Yeh Changti was tortured and held prisoner: Interview with General Hua; in Lost Black Cats, Hua, a former CIA Black Cat U-2 pilot, tells the tragic and amazing story of the nineteen years Changti and Chang spent as captives of Communist China, based on personal interviews. The sacrifices made by Changti and Chang have never been acknowledged by the CIA. On September 17, 1998, the CIA held a symposium called “U-2: A Revolution in Intelligence” to honor the declassification of many CIA-controlled U-2 operations and to celebrate its success. But the symposium omitted any mention of the Black Cat U-2 pilots according to my interview with General Hua.

9. second Black Cat pilot named Major Jack Chang: Ibid., ix. To clarify, General Hua also refers to Major Jack Chang as Chang Liyi—Jack being the pilot’s American nickname and Liyi being his “first name” in Chinese, which is his family name, the reverse of Western usage.

10. dull, dirty, and dangerous: Interview with T. D. Barnes.

11. “and then head back out to sea”: Interview with Lovick. “A colleague named Mike Ash and I designed an electrical circuit into the drone’s pallet to select an antenna to be used to radiate the recovery beacon signal. If the sensor package was not recovered by an aircraft and it fell into the water, an antenna was deployed to allow radio signals to enable recovery.” If the sensor package landed upside down, Lovick and Ash had created a system which allowed the seawater to act like a switch and activate a second antenna.

12. Yuletide: Interviews with Colonel Slater, Frank Murray.

13. “with PJs nearly falling off cliffs”: Interview with Charlie Trapp.

14. flight engineer, Ray Torick: There are many different ideas about why and how Torick died. I adhere to Colonel Slater’s view of the events. The drone’s first official test launch was on March 5, 1966, and during that flight, the drone launched successfully off the back of the mother ship while traveling at a speed of Mach 3.2. It then flew approximately 120 miles before it ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea, as was planned. A month later, a second launch sent a drone flying for 1,900 miles, at Mach 3.3, until it fell into the sea. It was on the third test launch that disaster struck and Torick died.

15. “He impulsively and emotionally decided”: Rich, Skunk Works, 267.

16. “never again allow a Francis Gary Powers situation”: Ibid.

17. “Ben, do you recognize this?” Ibid., 270.

18. dubbed Operation Aphrodite: Singer, Wired for War, 48.

19. Tesla’s pilotless boat: Tesla, “Inside the Lab-Remote Control,” PBS, http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.html.

20. Goliath carried 132 pounds of explosives: “Rise of the Machines,” ArmyTechnology.com, May 21, 2008, http://www.army-technology.com/features/feature1951/.

21. mother ship called Marmalade: AFSC History Staff, History of Air Force Atomic Cloud Sampling, 9.

22. Fox, was blasted “sixty feet higher: Ibid., 11.

23. Operation Sandstone: For the Air Force, maintaining a drone wing was expensive. It was also a security risk. In early 1947, that more atomic tests were being planned was a closely guarded national secret because the public was being led to believe that the United States was genuinely considering outlawing the bomb—or at least putting the United Nations in control of atomic energy. In reality, it was during this period of alleged international debate that the drone unit was again called back into action for the next test series in the Pacific. Operation Crossroads was supposed to have been a singular event, and so talk surfaced among the drone pilots. Being reactivated could only mean one thing: more